Burford Capital Opens Office In Dubai – New Report

Burford, a global finance and asset management company opened its office in Dubai. This is the first ever branch of the company in the Middle East region and it has been set up to meet the increased demand of clients for legal finance solutions from the region. Now, the total number of offices for Burford has come up to eight across the globe including in North America, Asia, Australia, Europe, and the Middle East. 

Burford has set up its eighth office in Dubai as part of its expansion efforts 

Daniel Hall, Managing Director of Burford will be heading the Dubai office together with his co-leadership of the Global Asset recovery business of Burford. Hall was relocated from his office in London to lead the Dubai office and the team also includes Joseph Durkin, who is an experienced arbitration specialist and legal finance expert based in the Middle East, and Sylvia Chandel, as the Vice President who is also an experienced banker from the Middle East.

The new Dubai office will be offering its clients a range of services related to risk management, asset recovery services, legal finance options, etc. The clientele will include financial institutions and law firms throughout the Middle East region. 

According to Christopher Bogart, the CEO of Burford Capital, the client base of Burford has been steadily increasing and legal finance has been a major area of focus in the Middle East too.

He said that the company will be meeting all the finance management-based needs of the regional clients as their physical office in Dubai is led by senior and experienced professionals. Bogart expressed confidence in the economy of Dubai as it will be providing better opportunities for the growth of Businesses. 

Even though Burford was a consistent presence in the Middle East and Dubai, it was more like an on-demand basis where they would fly in from London or other offices and meet their clients. But now with an established physical office, the on-the-ground presence will make a huge difference in accessibility for existing and prospective clients.

As the development projects of Dubai and the UAE are shifting to a whole new phase, the relevance of legal finance and asset management companies grows stronger in the region.

Daniel Hall expressed his excitement about opening their new office in Dubai and said that the company would be fully committed to providing its services in recoveries, arbitration, and litigation for non-performing loans.

As of the reports of 2021, the highest value of non-performing loans was valued at around 7.29 percent, which was in the UAE, and the lowest, 1.86 percent was in Saudi Arabia. With the global exposure and professional expertise that Burford has, the Middle East region will bring in new clients who would be guaranteed world-class service. Hall also believed that the new office was part of a natural extension of Burford’s strategy to make their presence felt in the Middle East region. But the Dubai office has been a bit delayed by the pandemic else it would have opened one or two years ago. 

Back in 2017, Burford Capital opened its Asia division of office in Singapore with Quentin Pak as its director. Burford Capital found itself in a controversy in  2019 when a hedge fund company Muddy Waters publicly accused Burford of manipulating accounts and misleading the investors.

This resulted in the company losing 65 percent of its share value in a matter of 24 hours. The asset management and acquisition company responded by releasing a nine-page document that cleared all the concerns over the company’s financial position. 

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Asset Acquisition and its related litigation is a major part of any financial or investment organization. This is termed as more of a complicated job that requires expert knowledge in law and finance as each market will be different and the strategies applied will also differ accordingly.

Burford offers to do the acquisition jobs for other firms and in turn, takes a commission from the value of the asset that they have recovered. The legal side concerning the acquisitions is also managed by the company through its highly adept legal network. 

All in all, Burford provides effective solutions for companies to offload their costs and risk caused by following litigation that can happen on a single-case basis or as part of a bigger recovery program. Burford is one of those few companies that provide efficient and manageable ways to monetize pending awards by giving the firms control over their cash flows connected with arbitration assets and commercial litigations.

They provide their services to small-scale startups to big fortune 500 companies and their methods are flexible and can be included at any stage of the legal process. The main team at Burford consists of around fourteen former in-house lawyers and with this, the firm brings in a pool of professional expertise and experience that is unmatched in this field.